Re: What counts as a basic color word?

Hmm, I have some books about colour terms for a
project I'm supposed to be doing.  Let's see what they
say.

One book says that Berlin and Kay proposed "4 primary
criteria for recognising a B[asic]C[olour]T[erm]s:
they should be monolexemic, and psychologically
salient in the field of colour,
and they should not be collocationally restricted or
be hyponyms of other colour terms."

It goes on to say that these criteria have been
criticised as inadequate, and gives another set of
criteria from someone named Crawford, that a BCT
should be "a colour word which is not a hyponym of
another colour word, nor contextually restricted,
and one which must occur in the idiolects of all
informants, and have stability of reference across
informants and occasions of use."

Obviously these criteria depend on having informants.
The author later goes on to suggest how one might go
about identifying BCTs in dead languages from written
evidence.

(Source: C.P. Biggam, "Blue in Old English".)

Rachel Klippenstein

 --- Peter Clark <peter-clark@...> wrote:
> Color universals are fascinating, but I'm
> trying to get at the underlying methodology. What
> divides a "basic" color from an "extended" color,
> either in theory or in semantics.
(...)
> Semantically, I guess we could define a "basic"
> color as the terms that are most commonly used.
> The "default" for when people don't want to get more
> specific, such as, "That car is blueish," which
> means that, while the speaker recognizes that the
> car isn't "blue"-blue, it's closer to blue than to
> green or to purple.
> But semantics only work within a language,
> not between languages. So again,
> what determines a "basic" color as seen in the color
> universals or whatnot?
>         :Peter

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